Jesse Jackson is at it again. This time his target is Silicon Valley. He has called upon the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to investigate why these high tech companies don’t have more racial diversity. He argues, “There’s no talent shortage. There’s an opportunity shortage.”

The latest figures show that nearly 90 percent of the people who work at Twitter, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and LinkedIn are white or Asian. Changing the racial diversity of Silicon Valley is what Jesse Jackson says “is the next step in the civil rights movement.”

Let me begin by stating something missing in his analysis. Asians are minorities. Somehow whenever we talk about racial diversity, people of Asian descent aren’t counted as a minority. Men and women of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Indian descent bring lots of racial diversity to the workforce.

Now, let’s look at graduation rates. Jason Riley, writing in the Wall Street Journal, discovered that 71 percent of science and engineering graduates are white, 14 percent Asian, while only 7 percent are black and 7 percent are Hispanic. If you add the white and Asian graduates percentages together you get 85 percent. That is approximately what you find in Silicon Valley.

If you focus just on engineering degrees you find the percentages are even lower. “In 2012, Blacks earned only 4.2 percent of all bachelor’s degrees awarded in the discipline.” As you might imagine, the percentage of blacks earning a doctorate in engineering is even lower.

Jason Riley observes, “Silicon Valley’s workforce does not reflect racial animus towards blacks. Rather, it reflects the rates at which whites and Asians are earning the requisite degrees from America’s most selective institutions. Forcing Google and Yahoo to lower hiring standards in order to satisfy Mr. Jackson’s definition of diversity would only slow innovation and make these companies less competitive.”

The best way to change the racial mix in high tech companies would be to improve the public schools where black and Hispanic students study and to encourage many of them to pursue a degree in engineering. That will be more effective than the Jesse Jackson Silicon Valley shakedown.